Author: Sam Allcock
The fact that the biggest oil money pools in the world are currently among the most active investors in the technologies that have the potential to eventually render oil obsolete seems somewhat bizarre. Fund managers’ loud advertising is not contradictory. However, it is difficult to overlook the direction of travel when looking through the investment portfolios of organizations like Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala or Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Approximately $15 trillion in assets are currently managed by sovereign wealth funds, which are state-owned entities designed to store excess profits from oil and gas exports. Since 2020, this amount has increased…
There is a particular kind of silence that follows public failure in the investment world. It’s more like the sound of people reevaluating what they believed to be true about someone than the quiet of defeat. That’s the silence that settled around Masayoshi Son somewhere in the autumn of 2019, when SoftBank reported its first quarterly loss in 14 years and the numbers on WeWork told a story too ugly to spin. Son had pushed WeWork’s valuation to $47 billion in early 2019, overriding objections from his own lieutenants, handing founder Adam Neumann billions from both SoftBank and the Vision…
On June 19, 2026, just before landing, a twin-motor Cessna 421 carrying Claude Guillemot crashed in a field close to La Baule-Escoublac Airport on the Atlantic coast of France. He was sixty-nine. The flight instructor with him also died. They were both described as skilled and certified pilots. There is an ongoing investigation. The Guillemot family’s majority ownership of Ubisoft and Guillemot Corporation, the holding firm that owns the hardware and accessories brand Thrustmaster, were the main sources of his estimated $130 million to $150 million net worth at the time of his passing. The funds represented forty years of…
One instance from 2019 still has a lot to say. In a nation where Korean pop music was hardly mentioned ten years prior, a group of seven young men from South Korea filled nearly 90,000 seats at Wembley Stadium. Outside the venue, fans from Brazil, Japan, the Philippines, and Germany held handmade signs. The music was in Korean. It didn’t seem to bother anyone. BTS had arrived — and behind them, quietly, methodically, so had HYBE. It’s difficult to explain what HYBE built around BTS without coming across as overly optimistic, which is part of the reason why so many…
Observing a savings balance remain unchanged is incredibly comforting. There is no decrease in the number. Nothing spectacular occurs. And that calm appears to be safety in a world where financial instability seems to be the norm. It makes sense. It’s also becoming more and more of an issue. May’s inflation rate reached 4.2%, the highest level since early 2023, partly due to energy prices that were shaken by the Iranian conflict. That figure is more than just a statistic. It’s the silent math of loss for anyone with money in a typical savings account, where the national average rate…
Depending on how you include the business part of his career in addition to the fight purses, Dustin Poirier’s estimated net worth ranges from $6 million to $10 million. That range places him firmly in the upper tier of financially successful UFC fighters — which is a smaller group than casual fans tend to imagine, given how the organization structured its compensation at all levels below the top-drawing stars. The McGregor fights had the most impact on his income. Poirier’s biggest guaranteed rewards came from their trilogy, which took place over a number of years and had a significant pay-per-view…
There’s a particular image that stays with you after following France’s pension reform story across several years — rubbish piling up along the Seine, the smell of smoke near Place d’Italie, and that low hum of controlled anger that French streets do better than almost anywhere else. The demonstrations against Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64 were not unplanned outbursts. They were organized, sustained, and — depending on how you look at it — remarkably effective. But effectiveness in the streets often comes with a price tag nobody tallies publicly. The economic cost of…
“Eljko Obradović signed a three-year contract worth €12 million net in June 2026 to return to Panathinaikos, the Greek team where some of his most well-known work was produced. With an annual salary of €4 million, he is now the highest-paid coach in European basketball history. It’s a new designation. It’s not the reputation it represents. After thirty years of coaching at the top level of European club basketball, Obradović’s estimated net worth is between $12 million and $15 million. Although his salary history has consistently set the standard for what a European basketball coach can negotiate within the EuroLeague…
At the age of 27, Kylian Mbappé is among the richest athletes in the world, with an estimated net worth of $250 million in 2026. Not only is that statistic impressive in terms of its size, but it also shows how early it has come. Most footballers who reach this level of cash accumulation do it in their mid-thirties, bringing down careers built across two decades. Mbappé arrived more quickly than nearly anyone in the history of the sport, and his trajectory indicates that the accumulation is still ongoing. The basis for current wages is the Real Madrid deal he…
Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s estimated net worth ranges from $190 million to $200 million. This amount is indicative of a career that was based on continually getting the most out of every contract, transfer, and endorsement discussion he has had. An estimated $360 million to $390 million is his lifetime gross earnings. The discrepancy between those two estimates — around $180 million — comprises taxes, agent fees, the cost of the life he lived, and whatever percentage went into investments. What remains is still a large fortune by practically any standard. The career that generated it spanned more than twenty years and…